


Love, In So Many Words

by Arej



Series: Ineffable Advent 2019 [25]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Love Confessions, M/M, Other, a million ways to say i love you, the struggle to say it properly even once, these two are ridiculous and i love them, they're not really male but it's m/m since i used male pronouns throughout
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 10:27:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21967819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arej/pseuds/Arej
Summary: Day 25 for the incredible advent calendar of prompts.Crowley loves Aziraphale; he just has trouble saying it.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Ineffable Advent 2019 [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1561027
Comments: 16
Kudos: 152





	Love, In So Many Words

Crowley loves Aziraphale.

Crowley loves Aziraphale, and has done for centuries. For millennia. Loved him in Rome, sharing a plate of oysters; loved him in Golgotha, sharing solace over a good life lost; loved him in Mesopotamia, sharing the shadowed hold of an ark, among two dozen smuggled children.

Loved him in Eden, under the shelter of his wing. During an unexpectedly friendly conversation between hereditary enemies. After a nervous confession, given in answer to an arguably impolite question. Loved him immediately, irrevocably.

He just can’t _say_ it.

He’s tried. Go- Sa- someone, _everyone_ knows he’s tried. The waiter at the Ritz overheard the first halting attempt, as words and wine turned to ash in his mouth and tears sprung unbidden from his eyes. In St James’ Park, the ducks have witnessed a dozen efforts or more, waiting patiently for bread as he chokes on air and frustration. A pedestrian not a week prior had shot him a sympathetic look when the endeavor somehow stopped his feet and his tongue at the same time, three meters from the bookshop door, forcing what felt like half of Soho to veer around.

Crowley is _trying_. And Aziraphale, sweet and understanding angel that he is, accepts the failures as if they were actually successes. _It’s alright, Crowley,_ he soothed during intermission at the Globe. _You’ve shown me how you feel._ And _I can feel it, you know,_ murmured in the soft darkness of their - _their!_ \- bedroom. And once, memorably, after Crowley had nearly swallowed his tongue fighting to set the statement free: _They’re just words, Crowley. Please stop struggling on my account. I’ve never needed words to know how you feel._

But his angel likes words - loves them, surrounds himself with them. Aziraphale deserves to hear it.

Crowley wants to say it.

He’s tried sneaking up to it, ambushing himself with the phrase, but that turned out to be a worthless endeavor - you can’t plan to startle yourself into something; it ruins the surprise. He’s tried tempting himself into an admission, only to realize six millennia in he’s immune to his own demonic skills - a logical, if ultimately unhelpful, discovery. He’s even tried saying it aloud in the echoing emptiness of his mostly-abandoned flat, to no avail.

It’s that last that prompted Aziraphale to insist - no, _demand_ \- that Crowley stop trying, after he’d nearly put his fist through a concrete wall in frustration. Aziraphale, concerned after three days of Crowley’s absence - unremarkable before the world failed to end, but unimaginable now - had found the demon shouting obscenities at himself, thumping one hand deeper into concrete with every syllable, voice gone drier than the Sahara and twice as gritty.

“Maybe it’s a horrific punishment from the Fall,” Aziraphale had mused, mouth twisted in distaste over such an underhanded act. “Clearly the bit about demons being unable to love is bollocks - I can feel it from you like heat from a furnace, my dear, radiating from you in waves. Perhaps the misconception came from an inability to _speak_ the words, some daft punishment meant to make your lives harder.”

Crowley couldn’t bring himself to argue. Although he knew - and knows - it isn’t true, the angel was adorably furious at the notion, and Crowley has a soft spot for Aziraphale when he’s full of righteous fury.

No, the problem is _him._ He’d spent six thousand years biting back the words every time they flowed up his throat and washed against his teeth, spent six millennia training his tongue to silence whenever his heart begged to speak. He’s done this to himself, siphoned the sentiment into actions and gestures and other, less dangerous words, words like _my treat_ and _a little demonic miracle of my own_ and _anywhere you want to go_ and a hundred, a thousand other substitutes.

He dreams of it, though. Of saying it out loud, freely and openly, with the sort of ease you find in the climaxes of romantic movies. A forbidden confession spilling from his lips like an offering, a prayer. _I love you_ , like it’s simple. Like it’s easy.

He dreams of it; has done for centuries. A large part of why his nap had dragged across decades is the enchanting world he’d found behind his eyelids, where he could speak freely all the things he swallowed down, where his angel reciprocated, in kind and in spades.

Except now he knows Aziraphale _does_ reciprocate, and he’s still trapped in a Hell of his own creation.

So he pours it out in every way he’s ever known; accompanies the angel to picnics and the theatre, brings him rare volumes and delicious food, scares the customers away and keeps his evening cocoa hot with barely a thought. Touches him, now, in all the new and exciting ways they hadn’t dared before.

Four of the five languages humans use for love, but he still can’t quite complete the fifth. It’s achieved borderline divine status in his mind, that last love language, those last three words. Aziraphale insists he’s already done it, a hundred times over and more; that all the praise and compliments and unwavering, unconditional affirmation of worth are worth more, even, than that one final phrase. Crowley quietly disagrees. He’s seen too many films to be fooled; it will never be enough. He keeps trying, keeps making the effort.

But when it does happen, it’s completely effortless.

They’re settled on the sofa in the back room, angled in and settled close, loose with the sort of laughter that once came only on wine-soaked evenings, but now is born of simple proximity. Aziraphale has made a scathingly witty remark about the intelligence, or lack thereof, of a particular archangel, and Crowley’s lips finally loosen enough to spill that last open secret.

“Fuck, angel, I love you,” he laughs. Then, when realization strikes like lightning, while Aziraphale’s sunlight smile is still spreading into supernova territory: “I love you.”

“You love me,” Aziraphale answers, and Crowley grabs both angelic hands in his, holds them to his chest. 

“I love you. I _love_ you,” he repeats, giddy and grinning with it. “Angel, I love you. I love you, Aziraphale.”

“Oh, darling, come - come here.”

But Crowley abandons the angel’s hands to fall back along the sofa, shouting his confession for the whole world - or at least the bookshop - to hear. “I _love you!_ ”

Aziraphale chases him down, laughing, smothers his response between them in a searing kiss. “I love you too, my beautiful serpent.”

“I love you,” Crowley answers into his mouth. “I love you,” he repeats, and they are the only words that will cross his lips for the rest of the long, long night.


End file.
